He got up out of bed and went to the window. The rain was positively forbidding.

He put his hand to the glass. Part of him wished it would open. He’d put his head outside and let the amorphous Goblin landmark drench him to his soul.

Or maybe he’d jump, and make it so nothing could ever scare him again.

Kamp remembered something his sister, Carol, had told him. She was getting ready for a night out when she saw her ghost. She’d closed her eyes and opened them to find a man sitting next to her before her vanity doing the same thing. Putting his own face on. She’d screamed and leapt from the seat. But when she looked to the bench again, he was gone. She told Kamp she was positive the experience actually happened because she and the man made eye contact.

It wasn’t a peripheral encounter, she’d said. We…connected.

From that day forward Kamp couldn’t walk past Carol’s room without thinking he’d see a man sitting at her vanity, applying eye shadow. This gave him nightmares and he’d wake Judy up. Judy always answered him that what Carol saw was her own reflection.

What do you expect from someone who throws up at the sight of a spider, Walter?

Mom had a way of calming him down that he hadn’t found a replacement for yet.

Everyone in Kamp’s immediate family had seen a ghost. Even his practical father had a story of his own. He said that, before Judy and he were married, he came home to his apartment and, stepping toward the television, saw a figure leap out from behind it, arms up, warning him of something. Judy told Walter that this story was bogus.

Your father drank more in those days.

But what about Judy herself? Kamp overheard her on the phone with a friend, her big hand cupped over the receiver, relaying how she woke up to the sound of shuffling under her bed. She looked over the edge of the mattress and saw a pair of sneakers slip underneath. She heard children giggling. That’s what she said. She said that of course she assumed it was the kids, Walter himself, but when she rolled off the bed there was nothing but lint beneath.

Kamp stepped away from the window. He sat at the kitchen table and absently fingered a piece of charcoal he’d worked to a small chunk, making measurements on the walls, where to place the spotlights, where to chop down the walls.

Then he started drawing lines on his face. War paint. Thick black lines that began near the bridge of his nose and curved up and over his round cheeks. While doing so, he eyed a pineapple on the kitchen counter.

The head of it looked like feathers. Enough like them. In fact, the longer he stared at the pineapple, the more that whole fruit looked like Blackwater himself. A native who knew this land was bad news long before the pale shades found out for themselves.